Leave Zucchini on Your Neighbor's Porch Day

August 8th is known as "Leave Zucchini on Your Neighbor's Porch Day." The entire month of August, however, is an exercise in creativity when it comes to zucchini--baked, fried, grilled, turned into muffins and bread--as this crop starts to pop up everywhere. Earlier in the summer, in my eagerness, I actually bought myself zucchini from a farmer's market. However, at this point, there is no reason to pay for the vegetable. In spite of my utter lack of green thumb, pretty much every person I know is growing zucchini, and leaving it in the most unusual of places: back porches, on top of the communal microwave at work, in boxes outside empty classrooms at the university where I work.

My mom had some pretty spectacular zucchini bread the last time I saw her, and when I asked her for the recipe, I promptly got a scanned copy directly from the old Lazarus cookbook. I even followed the recipe for the most part, except I had three cups of zucchini, rather than 2 1/2. I made one loaf of bread, and 12 muffins. The muffins were great right out of the oven, but became sticky after a day or two. As an aside, mom doesn't peel her zucchini, and it gives the bread pleasant green specks. For some reason I peeled mine, but it's definitely not necessary.